Stele v2 Is Live: 70,000+ ENS Names Migrated to Permanent @eth Identifiers

Stele v2 is now live on Ethereum and Sepolia.

Stele v2 is also live in the x2xPay.me app.

Existing Stele v1 names and namespaces have been migrated to Stele v2 and the new system is now the active foundation for Stele going forward.

The main changes introduced with Stele v2 include:

• a new label@namespace identifier format
• removal of bare names
• availability of the @eth namespace
• direct registration of names for owned smart contracts
• several smaller contract and integration improvements

For the full background and design rationale, see Introducing Stele v2: From Names to Ethereum-Native Identifiers.

70,384 ENS names migrated to Stele v2

As part of the Stele v2 migration, we carried out a one-off migration of 70,384 ENS names into the new @eth namespace.

That is, if you were renting an expiring ENS name like:

vitalik.eth

you may now also own its permanent, soulbound Stele equivalent:

vitalik@eth

No expiration.
No renewals.
No risk of fund loss due to ENS dropcatching.

Eligible users did not have to do anything.

We took a snapshot of ENS registrations end of August and assigned the corresponding Stele identifier directly to the address the ENS name resolved to at the time of the snapshot.

The migration focused specifically on names that appear to be used as genuine identities or payment identifiers rather than as trading inventory.

To qualify, an ENS name had to meet all of the following criteria:

• Expiry more than 5 years in the future — a signal of long-term commitment to the name.
• Exact primary-name match with the resolved address — a strong indication that the address actually uses the ENS name as its identity.
• No more than 5 active ENS names owned — helping exclude larger speculative portfolios while still allowing genuine users to own several names.
• Label complies with the Stele character set — Stele deliberately restricts names to lowercase ASCII letters, numbers and hyphens, preventing homoglyph attacks that can arise with visually similar Unicode characters.
• Address does not already have a Stele name — Stele enforces a global one-name-per-address rule, so an address that already has a Stele identifier cannot receive an additional migrated name.

The 70,384 ENS names that passed these filters were migrated free of charge.

You can check in the x2xPay.me app whether you've been migrated. Just enter your ENS name in Stele format (e.g., vitalik@eth) into the "To" field in the Send view.

If it resolves, your name was included in the migration.

If your ENS name has not been migrated, you can register an @eth name via the x2xPay.me app (Get Name tab) for 0.001 ETH (<$3) one-off.

If your desired @eth name is taken, you can choose from over 1,100 other namespaces, including:

• @xns
• @og
• @123
• @degen
• @100x
• …

A new opportunity to get the name you wanted

The new @ syntax also creates an interesting opportunity.

If the .eth name you always wanted is already taken, the corresponding Stele identifier may still be available.

You can register available names directly in the x2xPay.me app and use them immediately as payment identifiers.

WNS and GNS names were migrated too

We also migrated selected WNS .wei and GNS .gwei names.

The criteria were essentially the same as for ENS, with two main differences. First, as most names had a rather short expiration, we dropped the five-year expiry requirement. Second, if an ENS name had already been assigned to that address, it took precedence: no corresponding @wei or @gwei name was assigned, as Stele allows only one name per address.

For example, if an address had:

bob.eth
bob.wei
bob.gwei

and bob@eth had already been migrated to that address, we did not additionally assign bob@wei or bob@gwei.

If an address had only a WNS or GNS name, it could receive the corresponding Stele name.

Where an address had both a .wei and a .gwei name but no ENS name, we did not choose one on the user's behalf. Those users can register the Stele identifier they prefer themselves.

In total, we migrated:

• 98 WNS names
• 104 GNS names

The respective founders, ross@wei and donnoh@gwei, were included regardless of the general filtering rules.

Conclusion

Stele v2 is now the active foundation for Stele.

It gives Stele a clearer identifier format, removes unnecessary special cases, simplifies integrations, and creates a cleaner separation from domain-style naming systems.

Most importantly, the core philosophy has not changed: Stele names remain soulbound.